Taking Liberties

Meare reflections

Not much evidence of a movement towards an autonomous Somerset at the weekend, but there was a village street party (or there would have been if rain hadn't stopped play), a village scarecrow competition, debate about lorries rampaging through the main street, and lots of signs advertising a fete for the playing field; all evidence not just of life imitating the Archers, but of civil society in full swing. 

Getting a campaign together must surely be as much about creating a sense of community, having meals together, and discussing things informally as it is petitioning, marching, or protesting.  The Chartists knew this, which is why historians have begun to look as much as who was involved in organising tea and sandwiches, playgroups and informal schooling, as well as the more formal 'public sphere'.  On the train back I read something in the London Review of Books about the current possible failure of 'democracy’s authentic potential'.  The Chartists were fighting for this potential; I wonder if localised action, disconnected from national politics, is more the melancholy sound of its retreat.

And speaking of things outside of London, and on a more upbeat note, there's still time to see the travelling Henry VIII exhibition at York.

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A trip to Wales at the weekend, which meant a long wait in the coffee shop at Newport station thanks to 'an electical fault', 'problems in the Cardiff area' and 'level crossing issues'. It is a week to go before St David's Day (1 March – which coincides with the last day of the exhibition), so I was thinking about the Welsh aspects of the exhibition.

The highlight has to be the Pennal Letter, generously loaned by the French Archives Nationales (although the Laws of Hywel Dda may come close). Last seen in the UK during the opening of the Welsh Assembly, it committed the Welsh, a people 'oppressed by the fury of the barbarous Saxons', to the obedience of the Avignon pope as part of Owen Glyn Dŵr's campaign for French support against the English in c.1406.

There are many legacies of this, not least the string of castles built by Edward I. Some of these I saw at the other side of the valley at the weekend, as well as, more tangentially, some of the graffiti daubed on bridges suggesting that I 'go home'. A delay with First Great Western, I reflected, wasn't helping with this.

Along with perhaps the earliest devolution pamphlet, there is a strong showing of Welsh material in the Chartist section. Newport witnessed perhaps the most violent incident of the Chartist campaign in 1839. On 4 November, John Frost led a large group of armed men into the town. Two other groups were supposed to join then (led by William Jones and Zephaniah Williams), but they were late or never arrived. The 3,000 armed men that did make it attacked the Westgate Hotel, where several Chartist prisoners were being held, guarded by 32 soldiers and several special constables.

Twenty of the Chartists were killed and many were injured. Frost was captured, and he was tried at a special assize in Monmouth on 10 December. On 16 January 1840 Frost was sentenced, along with Jones and Williams, to be hanged, drawn and quartered. There were protests at the severity of the sentences from MPs and on the streets. After a legal review, the sentence was commuted to transportation to Van Diemen's Land (modern-day Tasmania).

Frost eventually received a pardon in 1854, on condition that he never returned to Britain. He spent some time writing and lecturing in America, but finally returned to Britain in 1856, after the general pardon granted after the ending of the Crimean War. He died in Bristol in 1877.

Historians argue whether the Newport Rising was a peaceful protest gone bad, or part of a national armed conspiracy. There are certainly signs of detailed planning by Frost and his colleagues. It remains, for now, the last armed insurrection in the UK.

Meanwhile, the Convention on British Liberty has inspired an article in History Today, which argues that 'the freeborn Briton is a myth. British freedoms have always rested on custom and convention, not on any fundamental law: on the transient goodwill of a mostly generous political elite'. Still, perhaps the fact that the trains don't run always run on time points to a decent dash of disorder.

Yes we can, 19th-century style

The exhibition contains many of the central documents of British history, such as Magna Carta, which I mentioned yesterday, the Bill of Rights, the Pennal Letter, the Treaty of Union, to list just some.

But there are also examples of a range of political campaign material: petitions from the Civil War, a Scottish pamphlet supporting the Great Reform Act, early trade union posters, gay rights posters and suffragette paraphernalia, such as the ‘Panko’ card game.

One of these always brings a bit of smile: ‘No Plumpers!’ proclaims a large poster in the Freedom of Belief and Speech section. It dates from the 1868 Greenwich election (Greenwich having gained its two MPs from the 1832 Reform Act) and the poster has probably been edited in pencil by William Gladstone and is aimed at those who appreciated his ‘cheap teas, cheap tea, cheap books’, platform.

The constituency, like many in the 19th century, also had two MPs, and the other candidate on the poster was David Salomons, the first Jewish lord mayor of London and the first Jewish MP to take his seat in the Commons (in 1851, after omitting the words ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ from the oath; he was later ejected from the Commons and fined £500).

The poster is thus partly about political equality, regardless of religion, or as we may well reflect on this day, race. But it is also about political language and the rhetoric of politics. As slogans go, you can’t beat ‘No Plumpers!’, which asks for a vote for both candidates, rather than ‘plumping’ for one.

It was also slang for landing a heavy blow on someone, or telling a whopper. Not quite a swear word, but certainly colloquial. I wonder if there’s a touch of the shock about this poster, with its language selected for the radical constituents of Greenwich. In its day it may have been as emotionally charged as ‘Hope’ or ‘Change’.

Language shifts, of course, and politicians have to adept at using it, bending the rhetoric to fit their own purposes. Reading Obama’s well-crafted Dreams From My Father, you also realise that as a younger man he had a great talent for swearing, perhaps up there with Presidents Nixon and Johnson. Today, however, one suspects that the oratory will be more high-flying (as well as grounded in the reality of the problems facing us today).

Politicians engage with the man in the Clapham internet cafe

I received an email from Anthony Barnett, who kindly loaned to the exhibition the first printing of Charter 88, reminding me that the ‘Convention on Modern Liberty’ is not far away (28 February to be exact).

This has no formal connection with the exhibition, but it is clearly dealing with many of the issues it considers, not least what are our ‘fundamental freedoms’, and where do we stand on them today.

I note that the challenges listed on their website include not only counter-terrorism and the ‘database state’, but also ‘financial breakdown’, surely something that wasn’t on the convention’s planners’ minds at the start of the process.

It’s also an interesting website, with lots of Web 2.0 elements that are integrated quite elegantly (and also include a YouTube clip of Hancock’s famous Magna Carta ‘did she die in vain?’ clip – something I wanted in the show, but copyright and costs prevailed).

The relationship between the web and politics was something that we thought about including in the exhibition, but space and time ruled out. And, of course, the web makes a better home for that sort of discussion. It has come up during tours, though, and the petitions from the Civil War have led several visitors to remark on the current version, the Number 10 e-petition site.

Politicians such as David Cameron and political parties seem to be getting better at making decent-looking sites, and campaign groups and citizen journalists have also been using them to turn politics, if not on its head, then at least to glance in a different direction.

None have proved as web-savvy as the Obama campaign, and it will be interesting to see how the president-elect uses the web once he is actually president. It even looks like he may get to hold onto his Blackberry (‘They’re going to pry it out of my hands’).

Hearteningly, I was speaking to Jacob in the press office today, and he mentioned that the Taking Liberties interactive has had over 100,000 responses, the majority of which have been online, rather than in the St Pancras exhibition alone.

Facebook democracy: a group worth joining?

A couple of weeks ago, I had to select and pull some items from the Library’s Americas Collections for a Radio 4 programme, The Long View. The show compared the problems facing the president-elect, Barack Obama, to those confronting Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933.

The programme was hosted by Jonathan Freedland, whose book Bring Home the Revolution made a something of an impression around Westminster – and garnered some envious reviews – when it was published in 1998.

In essence, Freedland's book made the case for the US’s political culture, arguing that democracy was more rooted from the ground up, and that voting on everything, from the school board and local fire chief, to the congress and president, was a good thing, and should be brought back to the UK.

It could be argued that it made an impression on government as well, and plans for regional assemblies, local consultations and elections to police authority were laid. Most of these have been abandoned, rejected, or (as MPs are fond of saying) 'kicked into the long grass'. (However e-petitions seem to be reasonably vital – even if they have been dominated by causes, such as changing the national anthem to a Human League song, that seem to have wandered in from Facebook by mistake.)

Today we read that the Home Office has dropped police election plans], for reasons that are not entirely clear. There is, no doubt, a certain amount of politics involved, and also a desire for some groups, such as the existing police authorities and local councillors, to protect their own interests. There have also been fears that far-right groups might garner undue influence.

I wonder if this says something wider about the political culture in the UK. The exhibition has lots of examples of mass, local involvement in politics, such as the Chartists and the suffragettes; and we had no room to include a section on the importance of local government, such as Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham, or the various London authorities which have, at times, been an alternative nexus of power to the Home Office.

Has this tradition died out, or has another habit, that of deference and delegation of power upwards, which admittedly has always also been present, come to dominate?

Finally, there is a wonderful picture of a policeman in the exhibition, which almost makes a visit worthwhile by itself: Olive Wharry’s prison scrapbook from the 1910s. A suffragette, she had been convicted of the very Edwardian crime of burning down the Kew Refreshment Pavilion. She carefully cut out a newspaper photograph, and labelled it as a policeman ‘carrying our bags’ as they were taken to prison, as though he was a porter.

Should the unborn have the vote? (Flight of fancy from Stansted)

In 1836, the Working Men’s Association met in Covent Garden, London. This small group of skilled artisans had first gathered to campaign for the exemption of newspapers from taxation. In May, the tax was reduced, and they turned their attentions to other matters.

There were many, from Poor Law reform to the amelioration of child labour, but the group realised that the main lever controlling the engine of state was the vote, to which they were denied as they failed the relevant property qualification.

In the minutes on display in the current exhibition, they resolved to campaign for universal male suffrage. This led directly to the People’s Charter (1838) and the mass Chartist Movement.

The vote is a powerful thing. In the 1830s, slavery had finally been abolished in the British Empire, in part because the anti-slavery movement gave its support to the relevant MPs and refused to vote for pro-slavery politicians.

This, albeit slowly, gave a political voice to those that did not have one, except in actions of direct rebellion. It points, however, to one of the problems with the vote: those who are not franchised, whether future generations or those overseas, particularly in the developing world.

This, I imagine, will be among the arguments of the young Plane Stupid protestors, who caused some disruption and inconvenience at Stansted Airport this morning. By making their way close to the runway, they managed briefly to topple the economic crisis and the current squabble about parliamentary privilege from the top of the news.

Given that the environment is near to tipping point, and the main damage will be to the next generation or the world’s poor (who tend to live in exposed, low-lying cities) there may be many who wonder about the speed of the developed world’s political systems and their ability to respond to single issues, however pressing.

You can't trust voters, but it takes two to tango

Along with missing The Devil’s Whore, I’ve also completely missed Strictly Come Dancing, the BBC programme in which C-list celebrities offer Saturday cheer by participating in a ballroom dance competition.

But now that government ministers are involved, it’s on the front of every paper. Lord Mandelson wants a go, and I can’t ignore it any more. In a complicated judicial process, the Great British Public have their say on the movers and shakers, along with a panel of experts. These two constituencies differ markedly in their views on the former political journalist John Sergeant, whose two left feet have been kept in the running thanks to the public vote. This week, at the centre of the media storm, Sergeant stepped aside, saying that he risked winning the competition. and "even for me, that would be a joke too far".

Does this mean that you can’t trust the voters (or, in this case, the phones), and that unelected experts have a greater legitimacy? Democracy sometimes leads to silly results, like the election of a ‘monkey’ as mayor of Hartlepool. Or to nastier outcomes, such as the occasional election of extremist parties; or to the seemingly counter-intuitive, such as governments elected with a minority of the popular vote.

Several sections of the exhibition look at the campaign to extend the franchise and relative increase in the power of the elected Commons over the unelected Lords. I thought that Sergeant did a mean tango, but I lack any expertise. Government is even more complicated than the tango, I’m sure, so perhaps I’d be happier to leave that the experts. These were arguments made by opponents of the extension of the franchise in the late 18th and 19th centuries: that to exercise the vote one needed a certain level of education and a real stake in society, such as property. Even John Stuart Mill thought some people, such as clergymen and lawyers, should have more votes than others, such manufacturers or farmers. The great man offers no word on ballroom dance judges, though.

It's crunchy. But is it Art?

The American writer Jonathan Franzen was on the radio this morning getting excited about the end of the credit boom. He was pleased at this particular correction, not only because it meant that the market was reflecting reality, but also because money-worries are a powerful source of human stories: pain, Franzen suggested, equals art.

I was also lucky enough to be invited to a private view of the current National Gallery exhibition, Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, which was notable not just for reuniting a series of works (including portraits of van Eyck and his wife) but also a fantastic trio of two paintings and a sculpture of Philip II of Spain – stunning examples of patronage. (I was also trying to pick up some tips on how to conduct a gallery tour.)

These two things – the Renaissance and the connections between money and art – were the subject of two good presentations during the seminar at Birkbeck on Tuesday. Did the wealth created by bankers in 15th century Florence lead to the leap in creativity in sculpture, illumination, painting and fresco; or, as some art historians suggest, had art become a safer ‘asset class’ during a recession?

Perhaps there's a similarly complicated equation linking rights and the economy. This is particularly true in the 'Freedom from Want' section of Taking Liberties, which looks at how social rights have developed from the vagaries of the Poor Laws to the creation of the Welfare State. But the connection is also apparent in the 'Right to Vote' section: as the cities grew and more people had a financial stake in society, so did demands for the right to elect representatives to parliament. And in 'Liberty and the Rule of Law', the suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1817 takes place against the backdrop of economic dislocation and the demands for pay rises.

There may also be patterns in terms of art and its responses to the political and social situation, especially art that reflects individual’s struggles and hopes and fears for society. Ernest Jones (1819–1869), a Chartist (and acquaintance of Karl Marx) was imprisoned after the great demonstration of 1848. He drew a series of sketches, including an idealised Grecian landscape. In the image shown here, the home of democracy is contrasted with a bleak vision of 'the English Town', with dark factories called 'Bone Grinder & Co', menaced by 'the Army'. Three generations later, Olive Wharry’s scrapbook records, in a cartoon style that doesn’t avoid the horror of incarceration and force-feeding, her experiences as a suffragette in Holloway prison. And, from the generation preceding Jones, William Blake's notebook responds imaginatively to the landscape of London during the repression that followed the French Revolution.

It pays to advertise. But does it pay to vote?

It was the Emmy Awards this week.  Mad Men, a show about a 1960s New York advertising firm, scooped the award for outstanding drama.

Why do I mention this? Well, the posters for Taking Liberties are about to go up, and the hoarding is already on display in the Library's piazza at St Pancras. The posters for the adverts make use of the visual language of street protests - stencils and suchlike - and the slogans are meant to catch the attention of passers-by. The ones in the piazza read 'In some countries you wouldn't have the right to visit an exhibition about your rights' and 'People died for the right to vote. So why do more young people vote during X-Factor than the General Election'.

One blogger has already pointed out the statistical question mark that hovers over the last statement, but it does catch the attention. What do you think Are the statements too glib, or do they do the trick?

Sterling Cooper, the agency in Mad Men, starts off by helping to sell soap and cigarettes, but soon branches out into political advertising, drumming up votes for Richard Nixon in the face of a young, TV-friendly Democrat contender called John F Kennedy. A central section of the Taking Liberties exhibition looks at how the right to vote expanded in the 19th and 20th centuries. In it, there is much evidence of early efforts at advertising, all without the assistance of Mad Men & Co.

For example, a poster puffs up the reformer Francis Burdett in an 1818 election, while a receipt records the beer and cheese laid on for his constituents of an 18th-century MP. There are also documents and objects that attest to the ways in which campaigning groups made use of publicity to advance their argument. The Chartists begin their great campaign for universal male suffrage, and the London Corresponding Society spreads its demands for parliamentary reform through letters and meetings.

Perhaps most striking of all are the suffragette banners and, shockingly, the film of the direct action taken by Emily Davison. She fell under the King's horse in, it seems, an attempt to draw attention to the cause. A grotesque doll, in contrast, pokes fun at the suffragettes.

Advertising, of course, is not just about shouting why your product is better than the others, or why the other make of cigarette stinks. It's about how it makes you feel: good, bad; fearful or hopeful. Advertising, we're told, is about trying to create a brand, something that gets under your consciousness. Their understanding of this is the secret of Sterling Cooper's success.

Of all the exhibits in Taking Liberties, I wonder if Magna Carta is perhaps the most powerful 'brand' on display. Most of its clauses have been abandoned over the ages, rather like the booster rockets of a space shuttle, but its idea of liberty and the rule of law has been reinvented in every age, and even exported overseas. This seems to me to be a hopeful message, and I think the tone of the advertising gets some of this optimism across, whilst also offering something of a challenge to complacency.

But the proof, as they say, is in the pudding; and the contents of the exhibition aim to draw attention to what these ideals and high notions mean in everyday life, both in the past, and today.

Conference call: Taking Liberties to the Lib Dems

It looked like a tough sell: Vincent Cable MP, arguably one of the most well-known Liberal Democrats, and certainly someone you would want to hear talk about economics during what is billed as the stormiest economic weather since the 1930s, was speaking at the same time as the British Library/Liberty-sponsored conference fringe event, a debate on liberties in modern Britain.

In the end, there was good crowd, all of whom looked like they were listening intently and came up with a good series of questions, ranging from the European Convention on Human Rights to ID Cards and political participation. Tim Hames, as we expected, proved to be the perfect chair: erudite, witty, and a good timekeeper. Lord Timothy Clement-Jones, the Lib Dem Culture, Media and Sport Spokesperson stood up and gave a good and slightly tub-thumping speech on liberalism and liberty (and complained we aren’t showing Areopagitica: A speech of Mr John Milton for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England [1644]; I’m pleased to say that we are). Finally, Gareth Crossman, Liberty’s director of policy, and self-confessed history nut, spoke up for the common-law tradition of rights. We owe a lot, it seems, to Henry II.

I tried to give a sense of the scope of the exhibition – how it’s about what our rights mean in everyday life, how they were fought for over time, and why these historical documents remain important and need to be understood.

Then it was over. The Taking Liberties banner was replaced with an array of malts for the Scottish Liberal Democrat reception, and we went to see what else the fringe had to offer. This included the infamous Glee Club. I came home with a copy of Liberator Song Book, which I shall pass on to the Library’s collections.

In the interests of political balance, Kristian Jensen, the head of British collections, will be representing the Library at the similar sessions at the Labour and Conservative conferences in the next week or so, and he will be joined by distinguished panellists, including Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Shami Chakrabarti, Francesca Klug and Geoffrey Robertson. It also looks like some of these will be speaking at London as part of the series of events linked to the Taking Liberties exhibition.